The Five Secrets to Building a Weissenborn Guitar
For more than twenty years I had always been very curious about building a guitar. He had played acoustic guitars for almost as long as he could remember. He had a great partner who lived on the street and we did everything together, so when he announced that he was going to learn to play the guitar, naturally, I didn’t want to be left out! We bought a couple of new guitars and practiced hard together, even on a cold winter night. We went to the local laundromat to practice when our parents kicked us out! ……Yes, my enthusiasm has never waned throughout my great hippy youth. until today, where I find myself living on a yacht in Australia with eight wonderful guitars at the unreliable age of fifty-eight… I’m even still doing some gigs!
But I digress! no matter how many guitars I’ve owned over the years…and I’ve owned a few…I’ve always had a secret desire to build one for myself. I imagined with pride how he would carve it all with love, encrust it with black coral, turquoise, silver and shimmering mother-of-pearl. But, whenever it came to the crisis, I just didn’t have the balls to really get stuck in and deal with it.
It’s wrong? I couldn’t figure it out. I had accomplished many other things that I had set out to do throughout my journey through life. He had built a 43-foot yacht, for one thing. I had learned that to finish a project was to tell every living soul that I knew I was going to do it… that way, I knew that later, when my enthusiasm waned, I just had to do it, if I didn’t, I would get the reputation of “will be, want to be” loudmouth. I secretly thought it was my “insurance policy”! It really helped for sure.
However, as much as I loved to play, my life was turned upside down when I finally went to see a great Australian guy named Jeff Lang play a concert in my hometown. I sat mesmerized, spinning, totally blown away by the rich, vibrant, fresh sound that seemed to spring out of this amazingly shaped lap steel guitar.
It just didn’t seem possible that a guitar could sound so complete, so haunting, so melodic, to tell the truth, I was so overwhelmed with it all, I felt tears running down my face, I felt so silly… Well, what a state to get into! It was a big crossroads in my guitar playing!
This incident never left me the same again… I wanted one of those Weissenborns so much that it hurt. I felt like I couldn’t face my other guitars again. I got mad, we didn’t talk for a few weeks… but I gave in, I had to. I had wanted a Taylor all my life…now she got it, was she never going to play? again? Something was different though… I wanted to play that damn thing like I’ve never wanted to play before, so I did, you better believe it. I don’t even want to think about how long and how many hours it took me to start getting better, but I did very well.
I have taken all this time to get to the point of this article. I had overcome the indecision that had haunted me… I couldn’t afford two or three thousand dollars to buy a good lap steel. No way.
Fortunately I have a great friend in Luthier Kim Hancock from Tamborine Mountain in Queensland. Kim, a kind soul together with his two boys (also fearsome luthiers) Dane and Sean, build guitars that are already established among the best in the world market…
Kim was really encouraging and gave me my first secret, without knowing it. If you start it up and fill it up… so what? It’s just a piece of wood, see what you did wrong, throw it away and ask for another piece… simple! Then get it right the second time!
The second secret came right after the first! Don’t let the project intimidate you… take control of it… you are the master, it is the subject.
The best secret of all came about when I started building… I remembered the words during our conversation a few weeks earlier… Treat each stage of construction as a separate project. The back, the sides, the bridge, the headstock… a separate project. See, that’s a good secret, I guess. That way you can see building as many small projects instead of one big overwhelming monster… Hey, and give yourself a reward every time you complete one of those stages… a beer, a lollipop, go out to people. Don’t get cheap!
The next secret is this: during construction there is always something that will stop you in your tracks. In my case it was “How the heck am I going to get the rear seam perfect or the front seam, by the way?” Well, my secret was in the fact that I had a good book on how to make guitars that Kim gave me. The answer was there! Attach some sandpaper to a straight-edged spirit level and then sand each section smooth as a baby’s bottom… see, simple when you know how!
So, find a way to solve every problem by thinking about it carefully… there is always a way to solve every problem you encounter, it may not always be the way you imagined! Oh yes, the name of the book is “A guitar Maker’s manual by Jim Williams”. You can get it on Kim Hancock’s site.
[http://www.Australian] Luthiers supplies.com.au Let me just say there are no plans for a Weissenbourn there though, you can get them from StewMac in the US or from other suppliers.
The final secret is really simple: make a firm decision to go all the way. In fact, I live on a yacht in a marina. I almost talked myself out of building the guitar over and over again. I’ve heard so many times “How can I build a guitar if I don’t have a shed, bench saw, etc.?” BS people, BS with a capital BULL. Make the most of what you have, ask your lumber supplier to cut the lumber to size, then plan so you don’t need all that expensive equipment. Man, THEY have it all!
There are also a few more secrets… I have written a book “How to Build a Weissenborn Guitar” that will give you some more lights to shine in those dark corners of that mind of yours. To help you do this! This guitar is really basic, just like the originals, no fillets, no braces (they don’t need them), very simple but the sound! YES haha!
It tells you how to build your dream guitar at your own pace right there, at home, in the garage, or on the floor, with a minimum of tools and experience. I now have a site about building called http://www.buildaweissenborn.com which you can also see in the author resource box.
There are some pictures of my new weissenborn in there, done by the way, with Australian Maple (a cousin of Koa) and an Indian Rosewood fretboard that doesn’t actually have any frets and may never have!
Finally, I hope that any of you reading this article want to know how my Weissenborn turned out…amazing! It’s the loudest guitar I’ve heard in thirty years of playing… I can barely sing with the sound! and that’s saying something because I have a strong voice… it’s not a good one folks, but it’s strong! It has been a leveling but amazing experience, thanks again to my good mate Kim Hancock for all the help and advice he so generously gave me, especially when I didn’t have to!